Timelines, family trees, moodboards, playlist breakdowns, fan art, fan fiction, Q&As, basically anything and everything to do with my writing besides the stories themselves. This will include material from The Lumina Chronicles, The Elemei Saga, and...
Just in time for the launch of Hymn next week, here's a lesson in reading and writing Luminous. While the language is spoken just like English (with a slight variation is some word pronunciations, resulting in a bit of an accent difference) its definitely not written like English.
If you read GG, you heard Maggie complain about learning to read Luminous, and there was an example of what the writing looked like in one of the later Elle chapters, but here's a proper breakdown for anyone interested.
Luminous, unlike English, is a sound-based system (I'm sure there's a fance term for that) rather than a letter based system. So there are more than 26 symbols, but they all make their own unique sound. For example, we have a, e, i, o, and u for vowels, but they all make multiple sounds on their own and then even more when combined. Luminous on the other hand has a different symbol for almost every possible vowel sound (there are eleven Luminous vowels)
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Now that you've seen a sample of what it looks like and maybe have attempted to put together what symbols correspond to what sounds on your own, here's a full chart. (Ignore the red typo lines, I should have cleared that before taking the screenshot but I'm a dumb. Also ignore the "typed with" info, that's specifically for the Luminous keyboard I created and has nothing to do with translations.)
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If you wanna practice translating anymore, here's a cryptic poem/prophecy and a letter that may or may not be minor spoilers for book two. Get your practice in now, because there will be several letters throughout A Hymn of Lies and Longings and I may or may not feel nice enough to provide translations of them for you lol.
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